A homoglyph is a character that looks like another character. For example, if you look at this letter: P, you would say it is a 'P'; whereas I say it is the Cyrillic equivalent of 'R'. Which one of us is right?

Regardless of the answer, there are ways in which this information can be applied for noble and evil purposes.

It was a regular day, like any other... Until I received an email from the person who controls an upstream VoIP server I use in my company: "We see a lot of failed connection attempts from your IP address. If this goes on, you'll end up in our blacklist and you'll have a hard time getting out of it".

It was filled with a bazillion of such entries, yet calls could be placed and received, the voice quality was excellent: no delays, gaps, echoes or "I hear them, but they don't hear me" effects.

"What the hell is going on?", the cat asked me with a puzzled face. I had no idea. This was a new shiny server built from scratch for the sole purpose of VoIP, to offload the old server (which provided a lot of other services too).

Programmers often talk about "stupid users" and there is a lot of humour revolving around this matter:

Every time someone declares their system fool-proof, nature retaliates by creating people who are more stupid.

People are the weakest link in any security system, airplane crashes are often the cause of pilot error, and nuclear disasters are often a consequence of the human factor. This is very well documented by Donald Norman in Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles.

It is often true, but not all the time; and when it is true - you're probably blaming the wrong person. The "credit" should be given to the creators of the system, for they are the ones who made the problem possible in the first place.

As a person with Tinnitus, I've been trying various things to deal with this condition. One of the upsetting aspects is that falling asleep is very difficult, because of the constant noise. At times it feels that falling asleep can take more than an hour, I keep twisting in my bed until my body is completely exhausted - then I have no choice but to do an "emergency shutdown".

This implies that even though I'm in bed for over 8 hours, I still feel tired in the morning; going to bed early doesn't seem to help me get more sleep.

I once made an interesting observation - when I go to sleep playing an audiobook (no headphones), next morning I resume playback and can't remember what the book is about. I rewind the story a little bit, until I reach a moment that sounds familiar.

Thus I have empirically established that when I fall asleep listening to an audiobook or a podcast - I doze off in 20 to 30 minutes.

Without audio - all I 'hear' is the tinnitus, and this is a completely different experience.

So here's a trick you could try:

go to bed playing an audiobook

next morning check how much of it you remember, then compute how long it took to fall asleep

then compare this with the normal time to fall asleep

If this works for you, then you'll observe that this method lets you fall asleep faster. As a side effect, you get to dive into an interesting story (-: